Great news: Content Drop 1 is here!
And with it, Aven Colony is getting 11 new buildings, a new sandbox map ... and a whole new transportation system!
We're thrilled to introduce the newest addition to Aven Colony hovercars!
The new Hovercar Station building automatically links to any other Hovercar Stations you build nearby. Now, you can not only solve your colonists' commute problems, but you can do it in style, by giving them swanky levitating hovercar vehicles to fly all around the colony!
(See our Twitter announcement and follow-up for full-size screenshots)
Content Drop 1 also brings a massive new Space Elevator.
While quite expensive, this elevator provides a literal stairway to heaven, connecting your colony all the way to outer space using a massive carbon nanotube cable. The elevator that rides it massively increases your colony's storage capacity while also docking directly with the orbiting Colony Ship to allow you to bring in large numbers of new colonists.
There's also a new tool to help your colony deal with plague spores: the Decontamination Unit! Just place one of these next to one or more tunnel tiles, and it will serve as a firewall, spraying a decontamination liquid that kills plague spore microbes and disinfects any infected colonists.
On top of all that, there are 8 new decoration buildings that help you make your colony even more beautiful while also improving morale.
Finally, this update also brings a brand new sandbox map: Serpent Isle! This is a beautiful desert island in the middle of Aven Prime's great northern sea, and is a uniquely challenging colony location due to its relatively low levels of geothermal vents and farmable cropland. Look closely and you can spot a number of creatures unique to this remote part of Aven Prime.
We also have a number of tuning tweaks and optimizations in this update.
As a quick note: please bear in mind that we have much more in store for Aven Colony.
As we go forward, we want to make sure that we focus our development on new maps, new buildings, and new gameplay modes that add as much value as possible. It should be clear from the new features listed above that everything we've added fills a gameplay hole or otherwise addresses key gameplay issues while also giving you tools to make your colonies look even cooler.
We have a BIG long-term vision for what Aven Colony can be, and we need your help to get it there. We are laser-focused on making sure that every new feature we add makes the game more fun, makes your colonies more beautiful, gives you more tools as a colony governor, and gets Aven Colony that much closer to where we see it in the future.
Here are the detailed descriptions for each new building and the full list of new features:
Hovercar Stations
Hovercar Stations allow rapid transit around the colony using levitating 1-passenger vehicles. A small number of Hovercar Stations can quickly integrate a large colony and allow you to safely place residential and work sites a good distance away from one another.
Each Hovercar Station can connect to up to 5 other Hovercar Stations around the colony, and colonists will use them to dramatically shorten their commute. Hovercar Stations also allow service buildings such as Retail Centers, VR Centers, and Hospitals to dramatically extend their range around the colony. Hovercars prefer to move over tunnels but can also move over empty areas, and can even support transporting colonists between completely disconnected parts of the colony. They can even travel over rivers and crater lakes.
Hovercar stations not only help you address Commute morale and keep residential structures separate from work sites, they also give a Commute morale bonus to the surrounding area.
Space Elevator
A Space Elevator is an enormous support structure for a carbon-nanotube-based wire that extends all the way up into orbit, close to the orbiting colony ship. Its massive size dwarfs all other colony structures, and it features an elevator that will gradually climb the giant cable all the way into space. Although a Space Elevator is very expensive and time-consuming to construct, it dramatically increases a colony's storage capacity and also supports immigration and emigration with higher capacity per trip than an Immigration Center.
Decontamination Unit
The Decontamination Unit is very useful for preventing the spread of the plague and plague spore microbes around the colony. It will automatically detect plague spore microbes and plague-infected colonists, and will quickly lower arms into up to 4 adjacent tunnels, spraying a special disinfectant spray that can cure colonists and destroy plague spore microbes that move past. This allows it to act as a very effective "firewall" if placed at key locations around the colony.
Decorations
A new set of 8 "Decorations" is available, including 4 enclosed "atrium" buildings that connect like tunnels, and 4 freestanding outdoor buildings that do not connect to the colony and do not consume power or allow colonists to walk through. These include fountains, obelisks, crystals, mini-parks, and more.
Serpent Isle
Serpent Isle is a brand new sandbox map. It is a desert island in the middle of Aven Prime's great northern sea. Its strategic location and its abundant metal and Zorium deposits make it worth colonizing; however, geothermal vents are scarce, and due to its sandy soil, the island has relatively few areas that are amenable to crop cultivation.
Additional Changes
- Significantly modified temporal antialiasing to cause much less blurring, especially when close to buildings
- Lots of optimizations that should significantly reduce the amount of hitching with large colonies and improve large-colony performance overall
- Added a new "Decorations" submenu and moved the Park into this submenu (from "Services")
- The "Spaceports" menu has been renamed to "Ships & Vehicles," and includes the new Hovercar Station
- Made Vanaar and Sandy Gulch in the campaign slightly more difficult (this does not affect saved games, only new games on those maps)
- Improved the look of the Employment overlay: now shows green arrows in most cases, or red if a worker's commute is causing a morale penalty. Also dramatically improved the look of this overlay. It also shows connections between hovercar garages in purple if any colonists use them in a commute.
- Improved the Commute overlay: this now also shows the red lines from the Employment overlay
- Improved the effect when you recycle a Prometheus Lander
- Sending an expedition out to investigate a distress signal which later turns out to be rebels no longer leaves you with "{0}" and "{1}" in the next
- Crowding morale should now be a slightly more serious problem at most difficulty settings -- but MUCH easier to addresss using hovercars!
- The Morale graphs in the Statistics panel were 50% too small; they are now the proper size
- The Bar & Grill now has a smaller morale effect in general and properly reduces the morale effect further at tier 1
- The Earth History Center is now more expensive and has a reduced morale effect
- The Park is now slightly more expensive to build
- The VR Center's morale effect has been reduced slightly
- Habitats and Skyscrapers now use slightly less power and a Tier-2 Skyscraper is slightly more expensive
- Laser mines now use less power and no longer reduce air quality as much as they did previously
- Fixed an issue where holding Ctrl to highlight buildings while dragging a building for placement could cause buildings to temporarily disappear when you released Ctrl
- Creeps & tentacles now vanish properly the moment a building begins its destruction sequence
- Added more specialized POI marker types for expeditions: rebels, splinter groups, creep nests, and plague nests
- Fixed a rare stability issue
We hope you enjoy all the new features.
Finally, THANK YOU once again for being part of the Aven Colony community. Let us know your thoughts on all the new features in the forums!
Also, a final note for those of you playing on console. We're in regular contact with the console team at Team17 to make sure these changes do make it over to Xbox One and PlayStation 4. No specific ETA at this time but it will happen.
Thank you, and we're looking forward to getting you even more big improvements in Content Drop 2!
Paul Tozour and the Mothership Entertainment team